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Yet Another Blogging Platform

Well, it's that time again: I've decided to switch blog platforms. To
commemorate the occasion, I thought I'd share a little bit of my personal
blogging history.

Xanga, 2005-2006

Way back in the dark ages of blogging, my friends and I all got our first
online journaling fix through Xanga. At the time it kind of filled the
role that Facebook fills for a lot of folks now: it was a place to say
whatever was on your mind whether it mattered or not, and get lots of random
feedback from as many friends as you could collect. That was kind of nice,
in a way …I think my Xanga site got more comments than all my other blogs
combined since then.

Unfortunately, it was also quite ugly. Over time we all drifted onto more
elegant platforms: most to Facebook, some to LiveJournal, and a few to
things like Blogger and Wordpress, which we had all only just heard of. I
think the reason I finally left Xanga was that I wanted to have a "real" blog,
one that would be read by family and friends outside of my immediate college
circle. And so, we move along.

Blogger, 2006-2007

Back in 2006 I was really into all things Google; it was only natural, then,
that I would be drawn in by the appeal of Blogger. In 2006 I set up the
perpetually-untitled jazzslider.blogspot.com,
many of whose posts have followed me forward to successive platforms. For the
most part I kept my Blogger site personal; I wanted to communicate with family
and friends, but not necessarily shout my thoughts at random into the
blogosphere.

I did, however, start to develop an interest in tech blogging towards the end
of my tenure at Blogger. I had recently gotten a full-time position as web
developer for UNT's international office, and was starting to think of things
to share. At first I posted these tech pieces on my Blogger site …but then
I discovered Wordpress.

Wordpress, 2007-2009

Wordpress had, and still has, quite the following among the web developer
crowd. It was elegant, highly functional, and just felt more mature than
Blogger at the time. I originally started In Defiance of Titles (the Wordpress version)
as an experiment with the platform; I figured I'd start posting my technical
content there, keeping Blogger around in the meantime for personal stuff. It
didn't take long before I realized that Wordpress was a lot more fun to use,
and just started posting everything there.

Wordpress took me through some of my most productive blogging experiences;
I wrote an extensive series on building a home NAS appliance, along with
a few PHP and Zend Framework development posts, a few of which even got syndicated
by phpdeveloper.org. By late 2009, however, I was ready for a change.

Blahg, 2009-2011

In 2008 I had accepted a position as a systems administrator in the UNT
Central Web Support office. It was a different sort of work than I had
been doing before that point —very little development. While I greatly
enjoyed the opportunity to learn a new skillset, I missed programming,
especially working with Zend Framework. To keep up my chops, I decided to
write my own custom blogging platform, quaintly titled "Blahg", on top of
Zend Framework and Doctrine.

When Blahg was ready, I also took the opportunity to start self-hosting on
SliceHost at jazzslider.org; this gave me complete control over my entire blog platform, all
the way down to the operating system. I loved it; having my own custom
solution really gave me a lot of control over how my content was published.
I still kept the Wordpress blog around for the SEO value of my major series,
but Blahg was all I really wanted to use for a long time.

Recently, however, I've started to feel the cost of running such a custom
solution, in more ways than one. For starters, my SliceHost account is
running me $25 per month —way too much when you consider that there are
free platforms out there that do most of the same stuff. Besides that, the
cost of maintaining custom software is more than monetary: anytime I wanted
to improve something, I'd have to code it myself. I enjoy that, but I also
enjoy writing …and that's why I have a blog, after all.

Octopress, 2011-

That brings us up to the present day. A couple of days ago I ported all my
old content—Blahg, Wordpress, Blogger, and even some Xanga—into an instance
of Octopress on my home server. Octopress is a
wrapper around the Jekyll static site generator, which
allows you to generate a completely static website from a collection of flat
files living on your local computer. You can then publish the generated
website to any host that supports static content …no need for fancy databases
or scripting languages. The best part is that you can write your posts in
a wide variety of syntaxes, including Markdown
—which has quickly become one of my favorite writing tools, even for non-web
content.

I'm hosting the new site in the Amazon cloud, using their free usage tier
to cut the costs (at least for the first year). Ultimately, all this means I
can run a full-featured blog site, retain full control of the presentation, and
pay exactly nothing per month to do it. Sounds good to me!

So there you have it: six years' worth of blogging platforms, all resolving
down to a good old-fashioned static website. Life does take its turns, doesn't it?